Download Finally, it is also worth reflecting on how, for both of us, the

Chapter 1
Bringing Britain into being: sociology, anthropology and British lives
Cathrine Degnen and Katharine Tyler1
Abstract
In this Introduction to the volume, we argue that the time is over for thinking
reductively of the anthropology of Britain as simply ‘anthropology at home’. We
also argue for the importance of creating space to promote fresh intellectual
dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Both sociologists and
anthropologists working on aspects of British social life are equally engaged,
now more than ever, in the critical investigation of a common set of major
issues such as the increase in cultural and ethnic nationalisms, economic
austerity and its manifold impact on communities and individuals, and growing
social and economic inequalities. Recognising disciplinary contributions to
areas of mutual scholarly interest offers not only sources of intellectual
inspiration for anthropologists and sociologists alike but also opens up possible
avenues for forging institutional alliances and solidarities in the current political
and economic climate of uncertainty for both disciplines.
1
Degnen and Tyler have each contributed equally to the writing of this piece.
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Key words: Anthropology, sociology, Britain, ethnographic approaches, UK,
anthropology of Britain
Introduction
The Sociological Review has a long history of publishing at the interface of
sociology and social anthropology. The journal also has a history of publishing
work within the anthropology of Britain, such as the Festschrift for Ronnie
Frankenberg (Macdonald, Edwards, & Savage, 2005) and a number of
anthropologists studying Britain who have served as editorial board members
(including Pnina Werbner, Sharon Macdonald, Sarah Green and Michaela
Benson). In this volume, our aim is to develop these important aspects of the
journal’s history and focus by putting theoretical debate and ethnographic
insights drawn from state of the art research within the anthropology of Britain
explicitly into conversation with contemporary sociology. Indeed, our contention
is that this volume will add a new dimension to issues of shared concern across
the disciplinary lines. We invite readers of The Sociological Review, both
anthropologists and sociologists, to join us in challenging narrow disciplinary
debates in the pursuit of common research agendas.
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Crucial to this endeavour is an exploration of the ways in which the
ethnographic study of Britain contributes to substantive issues and theoretical
concerns that are central not only to anthropology as a wider discipline, but also
more broadly to sociological inquiry. In this regard, we have purposively chosen
to focus our inquiry on substantive and theoretical issues that are pressing ones
for anthropologists and sociologists alike. These include: questions of
nationhood, post-colonialism, racialised difference, place, migration, everyday
relations with the nation-state, social class, post-industrialism, the environment
and more-than-human interactions. We explore how understandings of these
issues become enriched and deepened by turning our comparative, finely
grained, ethnographic, theoretical and methodological insights on them whilst in
conversation with sociological insights on the very same topics.
The lynchpin of this endeavour is the monograph’s contribution of an
anthropological approach to the sociological project of challenging and
subverting social policy myths and stereotypes about Britons and British social
life, as well as complicating commonsensical understandings of the world.
Indeed, if there is anything that can crystallise the common ground between the
two disciplines, it is this shared adeptness at scrutinising the taken for granted
in social and cultural worlds. Our contention is that this volume will not only
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serve to influence the ways in which sociologists think about the potential
contribution of the anthropology of Britain to their empirical and theoretical
concerns, but will also raise questions about the impact of the anthropology of
Britain for how anthropology thinks about itself. In short, our intention is for this
monograph to challenge and disrupt traditional notions of the anthropology of
Britain as simply the practice of social anthropology ‘at home’ by illuminating the
ways in which this area of inquiry is outward looking in terms of its interdisciplinary scope, theoretical, philosophical and social policy perspectives and
concerns. This Introduction is part review of the intellectual and historical
relationship between sociology and anthropology, part manifesto that calls for
anthropology and sociology to ally and rally institutionally in these austere times
for higher education in the UK, and part overview of the volume itself.
This monograph draws on papers asked to address these themes at a
symposium held at the University of Exeter in September 2014 to celebrate 10
years of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Britain and the
Commonwealth’s (ASA) Anthropology of Britain (AOB) Network. The AOB
Network, co-convened since 2003 by us – Tyler and Degnen - consists of over
150 scholars with a shared interest in British society from an ethnographic point
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of view.2 In this Introduction, we reflect on how the experience of convening the
AOB network has taught us to think of the anthropology of Britain as a set of
practices, and how it is we think these practices speak to the theoretical,
methodological and substantive issues of central concern to sociology and
anthropology more broadly. We in turn use these reflections as a platform from
which to introduce the scope and content of the themes explored in the articles
that follow.
Taking inspiration from the Anthropology of Britain Network
In founding the AOB network over a decade ago, we made the assumption that
there was a group of people ‘out there’ who identified with and recognised their
work as contributing to something that could be called an anthropology of
Britain. It seems as though we were right: there was and there is, as our
decennial meeting in Exeter attests to and which this volume has grown out of.
But, these are categories and assumptions that also require careful attention in
greater detail here and in the volume as a whole. For as much as we have both
2
We would like to acknowledge and thank Pnina Werbner for alerting us in 2003 that the ASA was
creating a facility for networks and suggesting to us that we should launch an Anthropology of Britain
network. We are grateful for her initial suggestion and subsequent support.
5
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been gratified and enthused by the experience of contributing to anthropological
knowledge of contemporary Britain, such an identity has also never been a
straightforward one for either of us, leaving us both at times with more
questions than answers. That is to say, we recognise that by asserting that
there is ‘something British’ and from an ‘anthropological’ perspective to be
discussed, we in turn draw issues of Britishness (and what Britishness is not)
and anthropology (and what anthropology is not) into question.
For one illustrative example of the dilemmas these categories present, consider
Tyler’s brief discussion with a colleague about the AOB network. It gives a
sense of some of the contradictions we have encountered when we have made
assumptions about who or what might constitute the anthropology of Britain. In
this instance, Tyler suggested to a colleague that she might want to become
involved in the network, assuming that this researcher would identify with the
anthropology of Britain because she is a social anthropologist who has
conducted fieldwork in a state-funded institution in London. Tyler’s colleague
explained instead that her work contributes to and speaks to the anthropology
of the environment and not Britain or Britishness. For Tyler’s colleague, the
anthropology of Britain suggests a focus on nation and so she could see how
Tyler’s work on race, ethnicity and identity engages with it but that her own does
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not. Here, then, whilst one researcher perceived scope for connection between
social anthropologists based on ethnographic locale (‘Britain’), another’s
interpretation of the very same category (‘Britain’) instantiated cause for
distancing. It is in part encounters such as these that have led us to conclude
that it is not a definition of the anthropology of Britain that is required. Nor do we
think that debates and discussions over which scholars are included and
excluded within this area of inquiry very useful. In this sense, we want to avoid
lapsing into a kind of ‘groupism’ that relies on fixed notions about what literature
and which scholars constitutes the anthropology of Britain and what it sets out
to achieve.
Rather, what we propose is of central importance is that the coming together as
a group permits scholars to create an identification and sense of affiliation. We
became a loose grouping with shared interests, which in turn permits scholars
with an interest in British society to create space to share, debate and learn
from each other in a way that is not otherwise possible. It is this broad
approach to the anthropology of Britain that has informed the way in which we
have convened the AOB network, and which in turn underpins the approach to
the study of the anthropology of Britain that we are advocating here.
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Indeed, in our experience sociology is a discipline that anthropologists of Britain
cannot ignore, a point that a brief description of our own academic trajectories
and biographies illuminates. We each completed our undergraduate studies,
doctoral and postdoctoral work within anthropology departments. Degnen’s
(2012) work based upon fieldwork in the North of England contributes in part to
the interdisciplinary endeavour of critical ageing studies, and Tyler’s (2012)
work draws on fieldwork in the Midlands area of England to contribute to ethnic
and racial studies. Both these interdisciplinary fields of inquiry are dominated by
sociological work and thought. In this sense, our respective research concerns
within anthropology simultaneously connected us intellectually to substantive
and theoretical debates within sociology. Moreover, we have both lectured in
sociology departments for a number of years. The accumulation of our
affiliations within both anthropology and sociology means that we have thus
come to understand ourselves to be intellectually and institutionally positioned
amongst the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology (Donaldson, Ward,
& Bradly, 2010). However, we also recognise that while sociology is a discipline
that we each have an established relationship with in the UK, not all social
anthropologists working on issues of Britain will share our perspective and
experiences. Nor will all sociologists who might share our interest in
contemporary British social lives. Given our own career trajectories and
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research expertise, we believe that putting these two disciplines into clearer
juxtaposition offers valuable scope to garner new insight into contemporary
social realities, possibilities and dilemmas.
And yet, the relationship between sociology, the anthropology of Britain and the
wider discipline of social anthropology is one characterised by friction and
tension. Our contention is that the friction and tension generated by these
relations is productive (cf Tsing, 2005), but not always amicable. To explore an
aspect of this tension, we begin by reflecting upon how Les Back, now a
Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, relates his experience of
presenting his early anthropological work conducted in Britain to anthropology
colleagues.
Sisters at war? The Anthropology of Britain in relation with sociology and
anthropology
Back writes how, having just completed his PhD in social anthropology in the
early 1990s, he was invited to give a seminar paper on his work to his peers
and fellow postgraduates at the anthropology department in which he studied
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for his doctorate. His thesis explored the ways in which racism featured in the
lives of young South Londoners and the formation of intercultural dialogues
across ethnic and racial identities (2002, p. 39). Before Back began to present
his paper on the meaning of young people’s “wind-ups” within youth clubs, the
Chairperson, one of the lecturers in the Department, asked him:
“Are you going to do the voices?”
“What?” Back replied, a little confused.
“Are you going to do the voices?” the Chairperson reiterated.
“What do you mean?” Back asked.
“You know”, the Chairperson paused for a moment before simulating
the voice of ‘an ignorant male hooligan’, “you know – ‘YOU FUCKING
CUNT!!!’” (original emphasis, 2002, p. 39).
Back’s retelling of this experience illustrates what he understood to be at that
time “a double standard” (2002, p. 39) concerning those who deserve the full
seriousness of anthropological attention, and those who do not. That is to say,
Back felt that the practices and beliefs of those that live in the Amazonian rain
forest or the interiors of South East Asia would not have been treated with this
derision and lack of respect. However, for the Chairperson at Back’s seminar,
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the voices and lives of those that live just around the corner did not deserve the
same level of ethnographic seriousness as others more geographically and
culturally distant. But yet, as Back later pointed out to us when discussing with
him this event, by speaking the voices of young South Londoners in received
pronunciation, he took something ethnographically away from these young
people by reaffirming the legitimacy of standard middle class talk.
For us, this anecdote raises not only the complexities of representation, but also
the derision within British social anthropology for most of the twentieth century
towards the anthropological study of Britain. Ethnographic research within the
UK was seen by some more traditional social anthropologists to challenge the
discipline’s ‘proper’ and ‘real’ concern with the study of ‘cultural difference and
otherness’ outside of Britain, Europe and the West. We surmise that one source
of this tension concerning the anthropological study of Britain was that
anthropology ‘at home’ was thought to blur the boundaries and intellectual
division of labour between social anthropology and other disciplines including
sociology. For example, if we turn to the wider history of sociology and
anthropology in the early twentieth century, sociologists’ key concern was the
study of modernity. British-based social anthropologists were on the other hand
more concerned with studying non-industrialised societies, most notably those
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that formed part of the British empire (Peel, 2005). We shall return to a fuller
exploration of this history later on in this essay, but suffice to say for now that
this historical vision of a division of labour between social anthropology and
sociology underpins the derision Back experienced. We suggest that this
derision is an indicative sign of the sorts of intellectual territory-claims that some
anthropologists were deeply invested in making and reproducing.
There is an interesting comparison to be made between these experiences in
the UK with what Gledhill and Wade (2012) write about in regards to the sense
of second-classness amongst anthropologists in North America not working with
indigenous First Nations peoples, but who are instead researching US and
Canadian society more broadly. These researchers first organised in 1990 and
then three years later became the Society for North American Anthropology
(with the inclusion of Mexico). Gledhill and Wade write that:
the ethos of this large group of scholars has been sharply critical, not
only of much of the public debate about social problems in the United
States but also of anthropology’s tendencies, when defined as the study
of ‘cultural difference’, to ‘other’ its objects of study without regard to the
wider political and economic context of their lives and the historical
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forces, including US imperialism, which have shaped them (Di Leonardo,
1998). This made…the United States and Canada fertile terrain for
studies of the social impacts of the restructuring of advanced capitalist
economies and urban transformation through gentrification, achieved
through ethnographic studies (2012, p. 489).
Gledhill and Wade call our attention to how authors such as Di Leonardo and
Bourgois “provided new perspectives on phenomena such as gangs:
anthropologists challenging the essentialist cultural and racial models that
pervade public debate” (2012, p. 490) in North American contexts.
Returning to the UK, if we fast forward twenty-five years from when Back
presented his seminar paper, it would seem that the disciplinary friction within
anthropology over the study of Britain has been transformed into a more
dynamic set of relationships than before, one that allows for an exchange of
individuals, theories, data and methodological approaches between
anthropology, the anthropology of Britain, sociology and other disciplines. A
creative space now exists, reminiscent of a period in the 1960s, whereby social
anthropologists who study Britain can teach and work within and outside of
social anthropology departments without having to defend their ‘proper’
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anthropological credentials. But this relationship also has an important history,
and one that we will return to, below.
We suggest that this current confidence within the anthropology of Britain is due
to the pioneering work of those anthropologists who have dedicated their
working lives to studying aspects of British society, including Jeanette Edwards,
Nigel Rapport and Pnina Werbner, whose reflections we include in this volume.
Collectively these anthropologists, and others, have shown in their work how
the study of British social life contributes ethnographic, theoretical and
methodological insight to substantive issues and philosophical concerns that
are central to the wider discipline of social anthropology. Our contention is that it
is now the time for social anthropologists who study Britain to extend that
discussion with confidence to other disciplines.
We know full well how complex institutional and intellectual disciplinary
configurations are within both sociology and anthropology, and how partial and
contradictory interdisciplinary relations can be. But yet, we also know that any
straightforward notion of the intellectual division of labour between sociology
and the anthropology of Britain is artificial, as illustrated by the issues and
concerns explored in this volume. Nonetheless, the institutional practices put to
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work to shore up disciplinary boundaries and to reproduce them, are also real.
They have tangible intellectual effects. However, today when sociology,
anthropology and the anthropology of Britain are seen to be in tension with each
other, it is not a case of simply having to identify with and defend one camp or
the other. Rather, we suggest there is something more interesting to consider,
and it is in this contact zone betwixt and between the disciplines that this
volume takes its full anthropological force and sociological meaning.
“Branches of the same subject”: A historical and institutional perspective
on the relationship between anthropology and sociology in Britain
Having established above the recent institutional setting in which an
anthropology of Britain needed to assert itself against internal disciplinary
biases, we would like next to turn our attention to the broader historical and
intellectual contours of the relationship between anthropology and sociology in
Britain, a history that also shapes the formation of the anthropology of Britain.
This provides the institutional and historical context in which the articles in this
volume are situated.
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We take as our point of departure the idea that the relationship between
anthropology and sociology in contemporary UK academia can perhaps best be
described by and large as studied indifference if not outright hostility. This
friction between the disciplines is facilitated in part by the differing ways in which
both sociology and anthropology have strong disciplinary identities in Britain.
David Mills (2008) in his insightful political history of British social anthropology
attributes the tendency of social anthropologists in particular to feel rather
attached to a disciplinary identity because of anthropology’s relative small size
and “distinctive history. In the UK, if not in the USA, the discipline has sought to
retain and defend an intimate and close-knit community of scholars. Marked
theoretical differences are tolerated because a discipline of small size can
easily unite behind the flag of institutional vulnerability” (2008, p. 175). In
contrast, Mills claims that the identity of British sociologists “derives from a more
inclusive and reformist history, even if its rival moieties often seem to be
perpetually feuding” (2008, p. 175). Having said this, many scholars move
comfortably between various aspects of disciplinary identities, and affiliating as
sociologist or anthropologist are part and parcel of their professional identity
formations (cf Mills). This we suggest is testimony to the overlapping and
intertwined intellectual and institutional histories of the disciplines, a relation that
led John Peel (2005) to describe the subjects as “siblings who came to be
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brought up in different environments, but who still remain in regular contact with
one another, and whose resemblances are so close that they are sometimes
mistaken for one another” (2005, p. 70).
There are three broad points we would like to make in regards to the history of
this relationship. The first is that what is striking when reading Mills’ (2008) and
Peel’s (2005) respective accounts of the development of anthropology in Britain
through the twentieth century is the extent to which sociology winds through it.
Sociology criss-crosses the story of anthropology in Britain in an astonishing
number of places in comparison with today’s institutional distance and
suspicion. For instance, Mills recounts Max Gluckman’s achievements in
building up a joint anthropology and sociology department at Manchester in the
1950s and early 1960s (2008, p. 93-4, 105). Spencer also points to the growth
of new departments in the 1960s university expansion whereby “many of the
British [anthropologists] moved into chairs and readerships, often in new joint
anthropology and sociology departments, in the subsequent decade” (2000, p.
12) and he mentions Peter Worsley, Max Marwick, and Ronald Frankenberg
(2000, p. 5) in particular. Also noteworthy here are Michael Banton and Ernest
Gellner – key figures who moved effortlessly across the disciplinary divide
(Peel, 2005).
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Our second point about the history of relations between anthropology and
sociology in Britain is one of institutional scale, prestige and class dimension.
Mills reminds us that in 1947 there were fewer than a dozen permanent
university posts in British anthropology, and only four UK universities (UCL,
LSE, Edinburgh and Cambridge) provided undergraduate degrees in the subject
(2008, p. 94-95). Nonetheless, by the 1950s British social anthropology, despite
its small size, had “gained … a high degree of official recognition” and “prestige”
(Peel 2005, p. 73) which was in part dependent upon anthropology’s intimate
connections with the “colonial administration – traditionally a career of
gentlemen” (MacRae, 1961, p.36 as cited in Peel, 2005, p. 73). A further
indication of the discipline’s status was its success in becoming established
early on in the twentieth century at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. By
contrast, sociology was denied such credentials and prestige, only becoming
solidly established at Oxbridge much later on (Bulmer, 2005, p. 44-45). In
addition to this, Bulmer reflects in his discussion of twentieth century British
sociology how “it has often been observed that the social background of UK
academics in social anthropology differs from that in sociology, though this
generalization is impressionistic rather than precise” (2005, p. 46), but in so
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doing points to the ever present British class dynamics as they make
themselves manifest in academia.
Notwithstanding these real and impressionistic distinctions, the post-war
expansion of the social sciences saw both disciplines grow, but sociology in
particular experienced a boom in the 1960s. It was this
rapid expansion and growing institutional dominance, especially in the
new universities, [that] crystallised the diverging methodological, political
and epistemological ‘slots’ (see Trouillot, 1991) apportioned the two
disciplines. Once established, this divergence was difficult to reverse,
despite the continued flow of ideas and individuals across the divide
(Mills, 2008, p. 93-4).
Indeed, in 1964 when Worsley was appointed as Professor of Sociology at
Manchester,“Gluckman fulfilled his vision for a joint anthropology and sociology
department”; but this harmony was seven short years later interrupted in 1971
when the two disciplines “acrimoniously divorced”, “typify(ing) the growing
rivalry between two deeply intertwined fields” (Mills, 2008, p. 93). As Mills
concludes, “the efforts by individuals such as Gluckman and Banton to forge
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interdisciplinary alliances had little lasting impact on intellectual debates... As
sociology grew and became more diverse, its relationship with anthropology
became steadily less important… Gluckman’s commitment to a dialogue with
sociology faltered” (2008, p. 109).
Also noteworthy of this era, before the rift hardened, is what Peel suggests
about the “historic intellectual prestige” of anthropology and “the growing
institutional strength” of sociology, as well as “the openness of British sociology
to an anthropology that conceived of itself as essentially sociological” which laid
the tracks for intellectual synergies between the disciplines particularly in the
face of the end of the British empire (2005, p. 88). That is to say,
anthropologists became interested in “extending their subject-matter” in ways
that led to a deepening of the intellectual, if not institutional, relationship with
sociology (Peel, 2005, p. 75). Peel comments that the “reciprocal tendency of
both subjects” had the effect of making British sociology “less parochial” and “to
move abroad, taking development as one of its specialisms” (2005, p. 88).
Meanwhile, some social anthropology also ‘came home’ via the anthropological
study of the West including Britain and other parts of Europe. For example, at
‘home’ in Britain, decolonisation brought the settlement of postcolonial people
from Britain’s former colonies to the UK. Over time this led to a new arena of
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inquiry shared with sociology and cultural studies, focussed on ideas of race,
ethnicity, identity, migration, diaspora, “nation and narration” and “processes of
subjectification” (see also Peel, 2005, pp. 75; 91). Indeed, contemporary work
within this trans-disciplinary area of study is evidenced by some of the articles in
this volume that explore issues of postcoloniality, identity formation, whiteness,
migration, race, ethnicity, class and nationhood.
But, as we have already indicated, this intellectual exchange and creativity did
not lead to institutional fusion. It lead instead to division (Peel, 2005, p. 88). If
we return to the period just before the 1960s expansion of universities, Spencer
(2000) reminds us how “whilst sociology as an academic presence in Britain
was arguably smaller and more dispersed than social anthropology”, by 1981
sociology “had expanded to more than 1,000 government-funded university
positions, growing at almost 10 times the rate of social anthropology” (2000, p.
4). Unlike sociology which was being taught in the polytechnics and the Open
University, in the vast majority of cases, anthropology was not. Additionally,
unlike sociology, anthropology was not part of the A-level curriculum (A-Levels
are the examinations that English and Welsh school children take for entry to
University). This meant that whilst “[b]y the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 18year-olds had studied sociology as an A-level examination subject; in 1999, the
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figure for anthropology remained stuck on zero (Abrams, 1981)” (Spencer,
2000, p.5).
After a long campaign to change this, an anthropology A-level was established
in 2010. Regrettably however the AQA has recently announced plans to
terminate this new A-level (Cassidy, 2015). This is significant both in terms of
the relative accessibility of the two disciplines to new students, but also
arguably in terms of perpetuating the relative institutionalised discrepancy in
size and scale between anthropology and sociology in the UK. There are of
course any number of knock on effects that might follow, but one particularly
obvious one is organisational. That is to say, the British Sociological Association
has more members (and more funds) than the Association of Social
Anthropologists which means that it can staff an office (with a dedicated team of
12) and mobilise greater resources.
The third point and final point we wish to make about the state of relations
between anthropology and sociology in Britain is in part inspired by Holmwood
and McKay’s recent piece in the Sociological Review (2015) on the
consequences for sociology of the current audit culture within HE in the UK, but
also casts an eye to the past. Today both disciplines are nervous about their
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future. That is to say, a sense of unease pervades both disciplines, with worries
over both funding cuts and a pernicious audit culture. Disciplinary identities
surface and are reinforced in moments of institutional pressure and tension.
These include recent debates over who ‘we’ might be paired up with on units of
assessment panels for the British government’s research assessment audits
that evaluate individual department’s research outputs and environment in order
to distribute limited government funds. For instance, anthropology departments
have baulked at the thought of being paired with sociology in panels on this
assessment exercise; and sociology departments have been more concerned
about the rise of social policy units that might consume them rather than what
might be transpiring in anthropology (see Holmwood and McKay’s 2015
reflections written after the most recent research assessment exercise known
as the REF).
However, what statistical analysis of recent REF data shows is two cognate
subjects that are not growing in research terms nor in institutional presence (cf
Holmwood & McKay 2015). One reason given (by some anthropologists) as to
why anthropology should not be combined with sociology institutionally or for
audit was that sociology was too large. This was invoked as a reason not to join
for fear of anthropology being ‘swamped’ by its larger neighbour. In light of the
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institutional pressures on both disciplines in these austere and uncertain times
for HE in the UK, we posit that this argument simply no longer holds up and
needs urgent reconsideration, both for sociology units fearing what the upsurge
of social policy units might mean for them, but also for anthropology units not
recognising that a potential intellectual ally is nearby. Instead of seeing
intellectual and institutional allies, the two disciplines often see a worrying
Other.
This contemporary unease is one that resonates with recent history and the
disquiet caused by the Thatcherite and the New Right’s attack on the social
sciences in the 1980s. This affected both disciplines, but especially sociology
(Peel, 2005; Mills, 2008; Spencer, 2000). Indicative of this era is a revealing
passage from Gledhill: “anthropology was spared much of the active aggression
manifest towards sociology by neo-conservatives, even if it was deemed
useless (for studying ‘the pre-nuptial practices of the inhabitants of the Upper
Volta’, as Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s chief bull-dog, put it)” (2008, p.
169-170). Indeed, in anthropology’s case, thirty years ago at the ASA Decennial
in 1983, “the question for many participants was whether, in Thatcherite Britain,
there even would be a social anthropology after the 1980s” (Spencer, 2000,
p.13). This also was a decade in which no permanent academic jobs were
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offered in British anthropology departments (Spencer, 2000, p.9), dire times
indeed for the discipline. Our contention is that lessons from the recent past
might help us see ways forward in which we can ally and rally, especially given
the continuity of each discipline’s intellectual foundations and interests. This is a
trajectory of reciprocity and exchange that this volume seeks to advance.
In the light of these three main points, we argue that this volume provides new
insight into how the most contemporary ethnographic, theoretical and
methodological concerns of sociology and anthropology are also not fixed and
categorical, but shifting, overlapping and intersecting. That is to say, in echoing
(but also extending) the historical and institutional trajectories of the two
disciplines, this volume demonstrates how anthropologists and sociologists
studying aspects of contemporary British society share many points in common.
It is to an overview of this monograph and how it furthers our aims that we now
turn our attention.
Overview and scope of the volume
Over the last thirty years, there have been three edited volumes drawing
together work within the anthropology of Britain (e.g. Cohen, 1982; 1985). The
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most recent edited volume in this genre is Nigel Rapport’s (2002) British
Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain, published fifteen years ago. One aim of
this monograph is to advance this genre by juxtaposing the most recent
scholarship within the anthropology of Britain with the thoughts and reflections
of foundational thinkers in this field, and put them into conversation with wider
interdisciplinary debates, especially within sociology.
This volume thus includes chapters by a new generation of social
anthropologists, as well as reflective, shorter, commentary pieces from social
anthropologists whose work, as we have already indicated, has been
responsible for consolidating an anthropology of Britain. The volume begins with
two prefaces – the first by Steph Lawler, whose work has made a significant
contribution to the feminist sociology of social class, and the second by Pnina
Werbner, a social anthropologist whose research has explored postcolonial
identities and the contested meanings of Britishness. Each author discusses a
concern that transects anthropological and sociological theory and practice:
Lawler provides commentary from a sociological perspective by emphasising
the significance of the everyday to both sociological and anthropological work;
Werbner reflects on issues of identity politics and multiculturalism that are
central to sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.
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While issues of the everyday are central to all the articles in this volume, the
first three chapters are concerned specifically like Werbner with an interest in
issues of nationhood, identity and belonging. These three chapters interrogate
the meaning and usefulness of the idea of an anthropology of Britain, providing
a pathway to consider the substantive and theoretical meanings of Britishness,
home and the postcolonial. In Chapter 2, Cathrine Degnen and Katharine Tyler
bring together sociological ideas of intersectionality with anthropological notions
of intersection to reflect upon some of the ways in which the anthropology of
Britain might usefully be deployed to interpret and explain contemporary postcolonial, post-industrial, white, classed, and placed-based identities. To think
through some of the questions that arise from this endeavour, they draw on
their individual ethnographic data of research in former coalmining towns in
different regions of Britain. Alexander Smith continues Degnen and Tyler’s
discussion of Britishness in Chapter 3 to examine the meaning of Britishness in
relation to ‘the Scottish Question’. This chapter explores the implications of the
Scottish referendum for sociological and anthropological ideas of postcolonialty,
home and belonging, and what it means to identify with the anthropology of
Britain in these uncertain times post the UK’s referendum on Britain’s
membership of the European Union. Laura Jeffery’s contribution in Chapter 4
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furthers the monograph’s analysis of the meanings of Britishness and ‘home’.
Like A. Smith, Jeffery shows how one legacy of the British empire is that
contemporary notions of Britishness cannot be contained to any simplistic
notion of bounded geographical space. To do this Jeffrey draws on her research
with displaced Chagos islanders and the dispersed Chagossian community in
three English locales.
Read collectively, Chapters 5-7 illustrate how an anthropological approach to
issues of social class, advanced capitalism and post-industrialism contributes to
sociological analysis of social class. They offer ethnographic and theoretical
insights that unsettle and disrupt media, social policy and political
objectifications of white working class people’s lives in contemporary Britain. In
Chapter 5 Gillian Evans puts the anthropology and sociology of social class into
conversation by drawing on recent anthropological research and theoretical
reflection to explore the cultural turn in the sociology of social class. Evans
deploys this framework to reflect upon the recent popularity of the UK
Independence Party. Insa Koch’s point of departure in Chapter 6 is the declining
rates of electoral participation, dwindling membership rates of political parties
and polls that chart the public’s loss of trust in politicians that have been taken
as evidence of an epidemic of apathy in Britain. Koch challenges this notion of
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‘apathy’ to show that for the residents on a council estate in the south east of
England, apathy is not equated with a withdrawal from electoral participation but
carries meaning that subverts hegemonic representation, furthering Evans’
endeavours to identify the distinct contributions of an anthropology of Britain to
sociological debates on social class. In Chapter 7, Katherine Smith draws on
fieldwork in North Manchester to question the distortion in social discourse and
political representations of benefits claimants. She argues that the lived
experiences of people dependent upon social benefits represents an affront to
the economic rationality inherent in welfare policy, and raises new questions
about local senses of fairness and being a ‘fair person’.
Sarah Winkler-Reid’s Chapter 8 takes up the issue of market-based,
neoliberalist reforms of the British education system and explores them through
the lens of anthropological work on value and sociological work on
commensuration. Via a focus on ‘ordinary ethics’ and personhood, Winkler-Reid
examines how school children and teachers carve out important spaces of care
that exceed simple measures of performance and audit. There is thus a
significant arc of inquiry woven through the contributions of Koch, K. Smith and
Winkler-Reid’s contributions whereby a moral economy of personhood and of
value becomes evident in the face of power, precarity and inequality.
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In Richard Irvine’s Chapter 9, the role of the state is made evident in a different
fashion: through the everyday management of the environment. He explores the
importance of thinking about long-term environmental change for the
understanding of human life and asks how might an anthropology of Britain
engage with the geological realities of the landforms under our feet? And what
kind of understanding of time is required in order to grasp how those landforms
are changing? Irvine discusses how for the residents of the Fens, in East
Anglia, long term environmental variability becomes, literally, unthinkable; yet
he argues how these surface-level certainties of the present are called into
question when the timescale of deep history is brought into view. In Chapter 10,
Andrew Whitehouse continues Irvine’s subversion and disruption of everyday
and philosophical ideas about people and environment in his analysis of the
relationships between place, birds and people. These are relationships once
again inflected by the state, but ones also by seasonality and other species.
Drawing from recent theoretical developments in more-than-human
anthropology and sociology, he explores the ways in which people, birds, plants
and other living beings are mutually imbricated in the world. Whitehouse’s
chapter brings the volume full-circle by returning to questions raised in earlier
chapters to explore how his approach is suggestive of how we might reconsider
both ‘anthropology’ and ‘Britain’.
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To open up a further space for dialogue between some of the themes discussed
in this volume and the anthropology of Britain, the volume concludes with the
thoughts and reflections of Jeanette Edwards, whose ethnographic work in the
north west of England has been central to the anthropology of classed identities
and notions of belonging in contemporary Britain. Edwards’ commentary draws
inspiration from and thus discusses the papers by Evans, K. Smith and Koch on
social class. The volume concludes with an epilogue by Nigel Rapport who
considers the implications of this volume for the meaning and progression of a
confident, creative and critical anthropology of Britain.
To conclude this Introduction, we return to our central purpose and reflect on
how we see this volume advancing our aim of putting the anthropology of Britain
into conversation with sociology. In so doing we hope to draw out why we think
this monograph will be of interest to both sociologists and anthropologists.
Firstly, our intention is for this collection of articles to be read as a staunch
criticism of the bounding of anthropological and sociological fields of interest.
Our argument is that the institutional divisions often put to work to separate the
disciplines have been to the detriment to the development and growth of both.
But yet we also recognise that in setting up this conversation between the
disciplines we run the risk of shoring up the artificially constructed distinctions
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between the disciplines that we hope to question. Still, we persist, convinced of
the salience of speaking with, to and about the historical and contemporary
points of both divergence and convergence.
All the articles in this monograph draw upon a project that is central to both the
intellectual traditions of sociology and anthropology. This is namely the drawing
together of ethnographic work and theoretical perspectives in order to
interrogate and challenge dominant and taken-for-granted imaginaries about
what it means to dwell in contemporary Britain. Furthermore, as Lawler’s
preface indicates, the chapters in this volume are interested in the details,
rhythms and patterns of everyday life, a concern also central to sociological
inquiry. For example, Evans examines the contrasting significance of differing
aspects of Bourdieu’s work to sociologists and anthropologists studying
contemporary class formations in Britain. We also note that K. Smith and Koch
in their study of white working class people’s everyday lives cannot ignore the
work of feminist sociological theorising on social class, and Winkler-Reid draws
both on the sociology of education as well as the contributions of sociologists
and others to debates on the nature of neoliberalism. Moreover, in our own
article in this volume we interrogate the contrasts and complexities between
sociological theories of intersectionality and anthropological approaches to
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intersection, and Irvine finds inspiration from core sociological texts such as
Weber to help him interrogate contemporary notions of the Anthropocene. It is
precisely the divergent, shifting and overlapping ways in which sociologists and
anthropologists approach aspects of British social life that we think offers not
only a source of intellectual inspiration for anthropologists and sociologists alike
but also opens up possible avenues for forging institutional alliances and
solidarities in the current political and economic climate of uncertainty for both
disciplines.
Finally, it is also worth reflecting on how, for both of us, the theoretical and
empirical insights, arguments and ideas that are offered by this collection of
articles has taken on a new socio-political significance and meaning in the face
of the outcome of Britain’s EU referendum in the summer of 2016. That is to
say, the process of working closely with the authors of this volume in developing
their contributions has provided us with a deep understanding of the sheer
complexities that shape the lives of people in contemporary Britain. There have
been many knee-jerk reactions since the referendum result was announced,
ones seeking quick explanatory models for the vote to leave Europe. But what
this volume and the anthropology of Britain more broadly has convinced us of is
that the lived complexity of everyday lives cannot be reduced in any
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straightforward way to neat and tidy explanations for the referendum outcomes.
Instead, it is the experiences and realities explored in this volume that form the
context of the Brexit vote. We believe that the contributions to this volume offer
profound insight into the contexts in which individuals, families and communities
across ethnic, class, national, generational and place-based identities made
their decision for Britain to leave or to remain in the European Union, and that
these are also the contexts which will shape how this new social, cultural,
economic and political reality develops in the coming decades.
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